Published 9:03 am, Monday, September 20, 2010

The name that does come up in buzz about the handsome young lead of Lone Star (debuting at 8 tonight on Fox) isGeorge Clooney.

Wolk’s portrayal of con man Bob/Robert Allen radiates the Clooney charisma — down to the sexy twinkle in his eye. It’s the sort of on-screen magic that keeps viewers liking the guy no matter how badly his duplicity may end up hurting people.

More than 500 miles away in the West Texas town of Midland, he’s known as Robert and shares a home with his sweet, naive girlfriend, Lindsay (Eloise Mumford).

There, he’s secretly bilking local investors, while on trips to Houston he works to impress his rich in-laws to cement his position in the oil business he aims to clean out.

When he starts feeling twinges of conscience and entertains taking seriously the big job Clint offers him, his father (David Keith), who brought him up on the con since childhood, scolds him: “They’re handing you the keys to the safe … You get your mind right and let’s focus.”

As different in tone as this show may be from Dallas, it still begs comparisons to that blockbuster soap.

“When I pitched it, I sold it as Dallas without the cheese,” said creator Kyle Killen, who hails from Austin. “So I feel like it definitely has things in common with that.

“I would like to think we will go at least a couple of seasons before we have hair-pulling and cat fights, but we may run out of ideas very quickly.”

Unlike Hagman, who’s a native of Fort Worth, Wolk’s roots are far from Tex a s . H e wa s b o r n a n d raised in Farmington Hills, Mich., the son of an artist and a women’s shoe salesman. In fact, Wolk also sold shoes from a young age and worked as a DJ while studying theater at the University of Michigan. He said both jobs prepared him not only for acting in general, but for his current role.

“Two things that those two jobs have in common are an ability to communicate with people and make people feel comfortable with you,” he said. “Bob wants to make people feel comfortable; his greatest tool as a con man is to make people believe in him.”

In the original Lone Star script, Bob was somewhat older. But once Wolk, who already had impressed producers as a teacher with Tourette’s in the TV movie Front of the Class, read for the role, that was it.

“(James) had a warmth and directness and charisma,” Lippman said. “It made us rethink what we needed from the role.”